E-Safety

As you may know, we have been working with Zoe Barkham from Rivermead Educational Solutions, who has been delivering internet safety sessions to the children.

So that you can carry on this work at home, Zoe has provided this brief guide to the information given to the children and some ideas for further support for adults:

The very youngest children had a story session, which covered the importance of being kind on the internet, asking a trusted grown-up for help, and not talking to strangers.The children were introduced to the CEOP “ThinkYouKnow” website – see below for more details.

Older children had an interactive session in which they discussed how to stay safer during their favourite online activities.

They were given four key messages:

To check their privacy settings – this needs to be done on every app or website they use, so that only people they know and trust can contact them or see their information;

To review their friends lists and to delete and block anyone they do not know and trust in real life;

As parents and carers, we would ask that you support this work by discussing your child’s internet use and by monitoring their online activity. Some ideas that may be useful are:

Check the PEGI rating for the games your child plays online.Many of the children in the sessions reported that they enjoy games which have a rating of 18, which are designed for adults and contain high levels of violence, criminality, horror and explicit sexual content;

Set search filters on sites like YouTube, google and Yahoo.Some children reported that their parents had done this but they had been able to guess the password, so you may need to change this!

Talk to your child about who they should allow to see their online profiles and information, and help them decide who is appropriate and who should be blocked;

Review your child’s privacy settings on their apps and websites, and the age limits for each social media platform they use.Many children reported that they have pretended to be older in order to access popular social media such as FaceTime.You can find information on privacy settings for many popular sites at www.netaware.org.uk

Help your child remember to stop playing games or using apps and websites an hour before bed, so their brains can calm down enough for sleep.Encourage them to leave phones and devices downstairs when they go to bed; and